Welcome to the Notebook
A little over a year ago, my husband and I decided to follow a long-held dream. We packed up our lives, moved to Venice, and bought an apartment to renovate and call home.
Navigating local bureaucracy, project managing a full structural overhaul through the canals, and building a new life here has been an incredible adventure. But as an Organizational Change Management specialist, it has also been a massive live experiment in human adaptability.
This notebook is a space where I bridge those two worlds. It’s a collection of real-time reflections on community, resilience, and the art of managing transition—proving that whether you are navigating a blind Venetian canal or a complex global corporate restructuring, success always comes down to putting people first.
Churchill and the Art of Plain English
In August 1940, Winston Churchill banned corporate jargon across the British Civil Service. Eight decades later, enterprise communication is still smothered in woolly fluff. Here is why over-complicated language hurts execution, why true brevity takes serious effort and three practical rules to strip out management posture.
Bicycles on Trains: Why Enterprise L&D Is Failing Your People (and Your ROI)
Why passive PowerPoint broadcasts and abstract metaphors in enterprise training waste millions in digital transformation—and 3 principles to fix human adoption.
What Kind of Unkind God Designed the Bat? (And What It Means for Leadership)
What kind of unkind god designed the bat? Standing in the Somerset twilight watching Serotines swoop overhead, it’s easy to be amazed by these flying mammals—until you look closer at their awkward, backward-knee mechanics. Evolution never redesigns from scratch; it simply tweaks legacy structures to be "good enough to survive." Most organisations suffer from the exact same evolutionary debt, cluttering their workflows with "bat-wing" processes and awkward workarounds. Here is how leaders can spot vestigial baggage and build the psychological safety needed to prune it.
When the Noticeboard Goes Up in Flames
Why do expensive digital transformations fail? It’s rarely a glitch in the code—it’s the human adoption layer. Drawing on a memorable classroom science experiment, discover a 4-part OCM framework to align major tech rollouts with genuine organisational capability.
The Weight of Enough
Arriving back in the UK with just a suitcase of bare essentials served as a quiet reminder: when you have enough, you realise how little you actually need. In corporate life, we often hoard projects, artificial urgency and perfectionism until we are carrying far too much weight. Drawing on agile Scrum principles—like the power of the Minimum Viable Product—this piece explores why "travelling light" is an essential leadership mindset and how letting go of 100% polish creates space for what truly matters.
The Umbrella We Build
True inclusion is about creating spaces where people feel safe to drop the mask—whether expressing their true identity or navigating personal loss. This post explores how leaders can build genuine psychological safety, distinguish between temporary capacity drops and poor performance, and lead with understanding and kindness.
Building Across Borders: How to Beat Hybrid Friction When the Clock is Ticking
If you can manage a high-stakes, cross-border renovation from your laptop, you can master hybrid team leadership. The secret isn’t more management; it’s a better rhythm.
The Myth of the Clean Slate: Why New Leaders Fail in "Historic" Environments
Lessons from a Venetian renovation on why forcing rigid frameworks onto legacy cultures causes internal structural collapse.
Broken Fuel Lines and Psychological Safety: Why Transformation Stalls
A breakdown on the lagoon is a swift reminder that a brilliant business strategy is entirely useless if your internal corporate plumbing is broken.
What do oncoming gondoliers and resistant corporate stakeholders have in common?
Navigating a blind corner in a narrow canal requires the exact same skill as managing change: knowing how to read the hidden signals and communicate before a collision happens.
Productive Procrastination and the Endorphins of the "Big Project"
Reflecting on the art of productive procrastination, remote working from a Venetian altana, and why the best ideas happen when you step away from the screen.